Good digital teams:
Based on Laura Bunt‘s post on leading charities in a digital society.
I’m going to try out some different retro formats, and this month it’s the starfish.
Tackling the four big risks (valuable, usable, viable, feasible) to create a quality product environment. Last month I started to work on improving how we test throughout the product development process, and on infrastructure reliability. Lots more to do here but stable tech and usable products feel like the most urgent.
I’ll keep working on my side projects:
My reflective practice of daynotes, weeknotes and monthly retros and delivery planning continues. It’s the most consistent thing I do. I also reorganised my roadmap a bit to make it clearer which items are achieving which goals.
Starting new things. Both at work and for side-projects (the list is growing again). High WIP is a constant theme for both. I think I managed to highlight one of the ways that unplanned work arises and gets in the way of planned work.
Systems thinking and mapping for understanding what makes things work the way they do (mostly human behaviour, assumptions, cultural practices, all the kinds of things I find hard to understand).
Using mini roadmaps/kanbans for each project to break the work down into more achievable chunks. I have these in my head but it would be better to have them documented.
Holding on tightly to things that matter to me but don’t matter to anyone else, e.g., what I see as the corruption of good practice. It’s just not worth the stress of trying to communicate why it should matter to others. I know it’s part of a bigger problem (systems mapping above) but I can’t change it by being dogmatic.
Thinking through side-projects rather than jumping into creating something just because it interests me. Basically, be my own product manager. But still giving myself the freedom to follow my interests. I think I can create some kind of template for this.
I’d also like to see if I can connect my side-projects and thinking more coherently. It makes sense to me that the stuff about responsible product management is one of the practical aspects of system-shifting product management’s vision stuff. And the technology charity is an example of system-shifting product management and using technology to achieve social impact at scale. So, I think they do connect, but maybe not in a very obvious way.
Finding opportunities to connect with people (in and outside the team). I don’t know how yet, but it feels like a valuable thing to do. My usual thinking is that this needs a ‘vehicle’, a reason to spend time together and talk about things but maybe that’s not always the case.
Whatever transformation initiative or framework adoption it is, if it fails, it gets the blame. Agile, lean, OKRs, etc.
But a concept can’t fail, just as it can’t succeed. It’s just a concept. It doesn’t come with inherent success criteria that define success or failure.
An idea, mindset, framework, etc., can’t succeed or fail. Only our implementation of them can, but that’s hard to admit so we blame the thing instead.
There doesn’t seem to anything in the project management principles that a product manager would say wasn’t also appropriate to product management. Maybe they aren’t so different.
“uncovering better ways”
These three words are what agile is truly about.
Uncovering – Not assuming the answers are known upfront, but that they have to be found along the way.
Better – Continually seeking to improve.
Ways – Performing a practice, doing, and learning by doing.
The lesson for this month; too much work in progress.
Tried to be more available for the team but still big gaps here. I didn’t manage to figure out the right balance between spending time with the team that is valuable and not leaving them with less time to achieve things.
Worked on some aspects of creating an ‘enabling environment’ to help with reducing work in progress, which is definitely one of our barriers.
We tried a few things to get better at delivering projects faster, including validating ideas, giving ourselves deadlines and reducing the scope. There’s still so much more we can do here.
Had a couple of interesting chats on Twitter, and joined a group video call about using AI in the charity sector and perhaps using it to accelerate innovation in the sector. One reflection I had was how dependent being part of a network is on making any kind of contribution like this.
I think the contribution I want to focus on is writing the technology charity book.
Started writing a book about the technology charity, and how charities can use technology to achieve change at scale.
Still haven’t done anything on my BSL course.
Nothing on this course either.
Nada.
Very slowly reading Delivery Management.
Added a few more things. Need to answer the question of whether it should have individual articles, podcast episodes, etc., which is probably more useful for users but a lot more work for me, or just have the blog, podcast, etc.
Wrote one edition of Irregular Ideas, just because I had an idea and some time.
I’ve got one email to write and add to this, and it’s been on my to do list for ages, but I still didn’t get around to it. I’m not sure it’ll make much difference but I want to get the thinking about the four ways charity product managers achieve value wrapped up.
Didn’t work on magix teams, but I have collected some more thoughts about what a ‘matrix’ means and how it’s rooted in working collaboratively.
I wrote weeknotes on schedule every week. That’s about the only thing I’ve managed to maintain any consistency for. I haven’t really written much each day, but I think I want to use the notes section of my website to record more ongoing thoughts.
Was indoors most of the month.
Hardly walked at all.
Did more on buying a house.
Organisations succeed when they have a fast flow of value.
Fast, because our users get value early and often and we get feedback sooner. Flow, because smooth efficient processes reduce waste. And value, because quality outcomes make it worth it.
Removing the barriers to a fast flow of value is the transformational work all organisations need.
Agile, lean, dev ops, digital, remote working; all of these are the tools of transformation, they aren’t the transformation. Being agile or digital isn’t the point, the point of transformation is achieving a fast flow of value.
All charities try to achieve five things:
Current product management thinking recognises four big risks to the success of a product or service:
(Cagan, 2017)
Mitigating these risks requires certain things to be in place to create the environment that enables successful products to be built and maintained.
Below does not describe a process for developing products and services, nor is it a checklist of things for each new product and service to consider in isolation. The aim is for these things to be in place as standard, always there as a solid foundation. By putting things in place that enable us to mitigate these risks, we create an environment for all products and services to be more successful.
Further reading:
A successful product and service is…
A valuable product and service is one that solves a sufficiently important problem for a sufficiently large number of users well enough that they want to use it instead of other solutions.
Understanding what problems users have and how valuable solving those problems might be for them requires research and analysis.
Data is analysed to understand how users interact with the product
This is assessed against:
Trends and possible futures are considered
This is assessed against:
The current market for the product is analysed to understand
This is assessed against:
This is assessed against:
A usable product and service is one that users understand how to use to solve a problem, when they are interacting with the product and service.
Creating a product that is usable for its intended users
A product should be accessible to its intended users.
Informed by:
Assessed against:
Using:
Products and services should take a ‘progressive enhancement’ approach, not only in the technical sense but also for design, content and usability, so that users with older devices and/or poor internet connection can still use the product.
Informed by:
Assessed by:
Using:
If the product allows users to interact, it is safe for them to do so.
Informed by:
This is assessed against:
Product and services should be testable against
This is assessed against:
Using:
This is assessed against:
A viable product aligns with organisational strategy and resourcing.
A product complies with laws and organisational policies.
This is assessed against:
A product needs to deliver more benefit to the organisation and the users than it takes to provide that value.
This is assessed against:
A product needs to collect, generate, manage and use high quality data.
Using:
A product needs to treat it’s users ethically.
Informed by:
This is assessed against:
Using:
The product can be operationalised and integrated into business as usual activities.
This is assessed against:
The product’s performance against metrics can be measured and analysed.
This is assessed against:
The product is aligned with the organisation’s strategy and aims to achieve organisational goals.
This is assessed against:
The environmental impact of the product is understood and minimised.
This is assessed against:
A feasible product is one that can be built and maintained to sufficient standard using the technology and skills available.
This is assessed against:
This is assessed against:
This is assessed against:
The product is built on resilient and reliable infrastructure.
This is assessed against:
The product prevents unathorised access to systems.
This is assessed against:
Creating this uses a deductive reasoning approach which assumes that the four big risks are logically valid and that mitigating those risks can be achieved by breaking down those risks into constituent parts and putting measures in place.
The term ‘Users’ is used to mean customers and/or users interchangeably.
